Interview #91 Johan Land, Chief Product Officer of Samsara

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**Dr. Tony Hoang** (1:00)
Welcome to The Artificial Intelligence Podcast, ranked in the top 2% of over 7 million podcasts on Spotify.
I'm your host, Dr. Tony Huang. Today, we're with a special guest, Johan. Can you introduce yourself?

**Johan Land** (1:12)
Yeah, hey, great to be here with you, Tony. My name is Johan. I'm newly appointed Chief Product Officer at Samsara.
Super happy to be here on the pod with you.

**Dr. Tony Hoang** (1:22)
So, Johan, the most cited labor study of the year puts knowledge work at like 90% exposed to AI and physical work at like nearly 20%.
And I'm seeing that like every major lab built for the 90%. So is this like smart focus or did they all crowd into like the easy half of the economy?

**Johan Land** (1:43)
I think they're crowding to the easy. I mean, it's so much easier when you have like a digital presence, things live behind APIs, the user is engaging through a screen with easy and clean interfaces. But I think it's the wrong one, too, in all honesty, like, most of the world is physical and runs in the physical in various tangible ways.
We like to say that we address around 40% of the world economy is physical operations. And that's where we play when we deploy AI into that. So I want to think that is the real place to do it. But it is probably a little bit harder than when it's everything is just already brought online.

**Dr. Tony Hoang** (2:19)
And I saw like a study where like 80% of the world's workers don't sit at a desk and almost like none of the AI boom was built around them. So was that like market overlooked or like did nobody know how to reach it?

**Johan Land** (2:33)
I think it is harder to reach because like often you need to deploy devices in one way or another to get to them. Because like if you're a worker and you're out in the field, like this is what it looks like for many of ours. Like they might go somewhere to repair a transformer or something like that. So they drive there, they got the equipment with them, then they unload the equipment, they do a job, they drive back and what not. It's a physical world where they do not necessarily always have a computer with them, or rather never have a computer. They may or may not have a phone. A phone may not be good to use in this kind of environment. It may be illegal while they're driving, etc. So you need a custom way of staying connected. So that's certainly one big barrier to like deploying AI overall. The other I think is that like you need to really, you need to be very tangible on creating value in this type of field. It's different if you just create a TikTok filter or whatever, right? Like, yeah, it's making your makeup a little bit better or whatever it is that happens. I don't really understand that stuff.
But when you deploy into this, and the bar is low there, but when you deploy into physical operation, runs on low margins, often is a life or death kind of situations in many of these cases, it just has to perform.
And having a, call it a low precision or low recall or lots of hallucinations or whatever it is, it's just not acceptable. So the bar is different, but the potential for value creation, whether that's economical or just for society, is also a whole lot bigger.

**Dr. Tony Hoang** (4:01)
So with physical work being at 20%, that 20% number reads two ways, either, to me at least, either the front line is safe or the front line is just last. So in your opinion, which one is it?